“White Paper” or “Ebook” is a booklet that usually can be downloaded from a lead-magnet (so-called gated content ). It’s a landing page where you write down a few bullet points about your publication, suggest downloading it in exchange for contact information, and your web visitors instantly know whether or not they want to read it.
In short, an “ebook” is a guide for a large topic, while a “white paper” is a report on a specific problem, which provides an in-depth solution or opinion and showcases your brand as an industry expert on this topic.
Todd Mumford, VP of Growth Marketing at Riverbed Marketing, adds that this difference leads to different use cases depending on the stage of a buyer’s journey.
Most likely you’ll offer:
- an ebook for web visitors who are either not in your sales funnel yet or are at the early stages, and
- a white paper for those ones who are already in your sales funnel (know your company and products/services, probably have a certain predilection for buying from you, and need some indisputable evidence that they make the right choice).
According to different authors, ebooks cover “how-to” topics while white papers contain “which one” information.
In her article on Hubspot, Lindsay Kolowich Cox warns that white paper isn’t a product pitch where you can tell the world why people need to buy your product right now. The white paper informs about the best solution and persuades based on facts and evidence. Whereby ebooks and whitepapers can start on the same template.
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